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We are excited to welcome Nestor Guerrero to the ACTA team as the Sounds of California Archives and Media Intern based in Los Angeles! Nestor will be working with our LA team on our Sounds of California: Boyle Heights program, assisting specifically with archiving field documentation.
Nestor (he/him) was selected from a pool of more than 30 applicants. We admire his longtime commitment to the musical communities of Los Angeles, and we are excited for his contributions to our Sounds of California work in Boyle Heights!
Nestor is an aspiring multi-media storyteller from Whittier, CA and a recent graduate from UCLA, where he studied Chicana/o + Central American Studies and English, with a minor in Digital Humanities. During his time in undergrad he was heavily involved in student organizing and college radio, where he ran his own show for two years centered on documenting the oral histories of Latinx DJs based in Southern California. Nestor was inspired to learn more about archival work through his experiences doing community engaged research on LGBTQ+ nightlife in the greater Los Angeles area. In his free time, Nestor likes to water his plants and go crate digging for vinyl he can create mixtapes out of at local record stores. We asked Nestor what drew him to work with ACTA:
What about the Sounds of California project excites you?
I saw the Sounds of California project as an opportunity for me to transfer the skills I developed in college as a radio host and oral historian towards documenting the stories and the sounds embedded in expressive cultures and narratives that can be felt throughout the community of Boyle Heights. What I find the most exciting about contributing to this project is the opportunities for artistic collaboration with the community members of East LA. I am excited to get to know the stories that exist and emerge in this unprecedented time that we are living in, and am looking forward to being part of the efforts that empower and amplify community voices— especially in a time where connecting and building community with others is more crucial than ever before.
What do you hope to learn during your time at ACTA?
Through my experiences with ACTA, I hope to develop more intimate ways of engaging with communities and how to foster genuine relationships with them, as well as learn a more personal and collaborative approach on storytelling and audio/visual documentation. I ultimately hope to strengthen my own practice of listening in detail—to pick up on the sounds that characterize the vibrant communities of Boyle Heights.
This internship is supported by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture’s Arts Internship Program.